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Child mortality remains on the increase because of poverty

Jul/2/2015

In response to the report of UNICEF on child mortality which states that:

Reduced reflexes and little willingness to finance relief projects show many governments of developed countries, in terms of efforts by international organizations such as UNICEF to improve the lives of millions of children who are trapped in the vice of poverty, hunger and disease, underlines the latest report of the UN about children. Certainly the report, as usual, records the tragic situation without touching the causes that created it, i.e. the capitalist barbarity, the interventions and the wars of the imperialists.

The elements of UNICEF record the following alarming sad situation:

a) The poorest children in the world have two times more possibilities to die before their fifth birthday, compared with the children of wealthiest families or countries.

b) The percentage of children who die a few days after birth increase significantly.

c) While supposedly the number of people who in 1990 lived in extreme poverty has dropped to one billion, of the nearly 1.9 billion, today almost half of them (about 47%) are children and young people under 18 years old.

d) At least 58 million children in the world remain illiterate, since they do not go to school due to poverty.

More acute are the problems that millions of children face especially in India, where capitalist development over the past 15 years has brought the 60% of the population living in extreme poverty and struggling to survive through the limited amount of less than two US dollars a day that have at their disposal. This explains the dramatic images of millions of children who live completely abandoned in the biggest cities of India, of whom (according to experts) around 68 million are at risk of dying before they reach the age of five. Another 119 million children in India suffer from chronic malnutrition, while 700 000 children die of curable diseases every year due to poverty.

UN officials, in response to the above report, noted that they should strive to set new sustainable development goals which will involve improving the lives of children in all countries, rich and developing, by 2030, since the capitalism worsens everybody’s life, regardless of “development” to national or regional levels…

WFTU (FISE), the World Federation of Teachers Unions highlights the need to strengthen the fight against the causes that create poverty. Against the capitalist system that breeds the poverty, the wars, the imperialist barbarism, the child mortality.

It also invites the teachers’ unions to develop more actions through the guidelines of WFTU (FISE), the guidelines and actions of the WFTU (World Federation of Trade Unions) by strengthening the unions that oppose to the causes that generate and reproduce infant mortality.

The struggle needs to be strengthened so that the science and the technology serve people’s needs and not the profits of monopolies